There are many modern computing applications that require visual data to be sent from a server to a client computer. In fact, many server-based computing applications are premised on the notion that information to be displayed on the screen of a client computer will be generated at the server and sent to the client. A non-limiting list of such server-based applications includes virtualization systems, networked gaming platforms, and remote desktop systems.
Consider the typical interactive multi-user game applications, in which the users' computing systems are connected by a network to a centralized game program on a remote server. The user interacts with the game program by providing inputs from the user's local computer system. However, the visual contents that are seen by the user are instituted by the operations of the remote game program on the server, which are then locally displayed to the user on the user's local display device.
The issue is that there is potentially a tremendous amount of data that must be sent from the server to the client to allow these modern server-based applications to effectively display visual content to the user. For example, many interactive gaming applications have rapidly and constantly changing parts of screen, e.g., because of game characters that move around or because of game actions that result in changes to objects in the visual screen. As a result, if the game is a server-based game, there may be a need to have a continual stream of updates to the visual content that is displayed to the user. Such visual data that needs to be sent from the server to the client machine is often very large in terms of its transmission size.
If a large quantity of visual data must be sent to client machine, then a significant amount of network bandwidth will be needed send that data across the network. The problem is that there is a limited amount of bandwidth that is available for such applications. This bandwidth limitation is at several different levels of the network hierarchy. At the level of the service provider or server host, the bandwidth limitations are very real, since the provider must potentially service a large number of users, many of which are paying customers that will not tolerate interruptions because of a lack of bandwidth available to the service provider. At the level of the user, he/she may be limited in the amount of bandwidth that is available or that has been purchased for his/her service plan, and hence will not have an unlimited amount of bandwidth to receive visual content. However, with the growing competition that exists for these server-based services and application, users will not be tolerant of bad gameplay or a bad user experience as a result of slowed delivery of visual content.
As the number of users of server-based computing increases, and the amount of visual content is sent across the network increases, this problem will only increase over time. As a result, there is a need for an improved approach to increase the efficient utilization of the network bandwidth for display of visual content from server-based programs.